Using Photography in Fiction and an Extract from a Novel
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Article How to Cite: Strachan, Z 2017 Tiny Jubilations: Using Photography in Fiction and an Extract from a Novel. C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, 5(2): 7, pp. 1–23, DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/c21.25 Published: 10 March 2017 Peer Review: This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, which is a journal of the Open Library of Humanities. Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distri- bution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Open Access: C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings is a peer-reviewed open access journal. Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service. The Open Library of Humanities is an open access non-profit publisher of scholarly articles and monographs. Zoë Strachan, ‘Tiny Jubilations: Using Photography in Fiction and an Extract from a Novel’ (2017) 5(2): 7 C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/c21.25 ARTICLE Tiny Jubilations: Using Photography in Fiction and an Extract from a Novel Zoë Strachan University of Glasgow, GB [email protected] Zoë Strachan offers here an examination of the haunting power of photography as a creative stimulus. She discusses the use of photographs in Janice Galloway’s two autobiographies This is Not About Me (2008) and All Made Up (2011), as well as her own use of photographic inspiration for her currently untitled new novel, an extract from which closes the special issue. Keywords: memory; photography; creative writing; family narratives; Scottish literature Street photographers were a feature of seaside towns in Britain from the 1850s until the 1950s and beyond. Their heyday was in the 1930s. On the August Bank Holiday of 1939, the fifty ‘reflex men’ working for Sunbeam Photos of Margate took Figure 1: Largs, July 1943. 2 Strachan: Tiny Jubilations 35,000 photographs of holidaymakers and day-trippers (Harding 2013). The typical image was the ‘walkie’, in which the subjects were snapped as they walked along the promenade, and then handed a receipt so that they could purchase the image from a shop or stall once developed. The photos might be retained as keepsakes or sent to a friend as a holiday postcard. At present I am using two particular kinds of photographs to help me write a novel: family photos from an album that belonged to my grandmother, and archival photographs taken of Kilmarnock by the town planning department of what is now East Ayrshire Council. These latter – discovered by a librarian friend in a musty box, ignored for decades – depict buildings scheduled for demolition and new builds, amongst other, sometimes incongruous, sights. The novel is a kind of family saga set in small town Scotland between 1935 and 1970, or at least it focusses on the lives, marriage and ambitions of a couple, Rena and Bobby. While it would be accurate to say that the photographs are part of the historical research process, their role is more fundamental and more complex than that; the novel is set in my home town of Kilmarnock and the characters and their stories are based, loosely, on real people and events. I want to use this article to investigate photography and fiction in both general and personal terms, and I will end by presenting a short extract from my work in progress. The photograph reproduced above comes from a family album. Although walking photographs were far less common during the war, I assume it was taken by a street photographer. Largs was a seaside resort, and an overflow seaplane base operated there, so there would have been plenty of visitors in 1943. Although taken in great numbers, and not conceived as art, walkies demanded skill, an almost instan- taneous assessment of time and movement by the photographer: ‘The trick was to focus slightly in front of people walking towards you to allow for the slight delay in taking the photograph after releasing the shutter,’ explains Colin Harding, Curator of Photographic Technology at the National Media Museum (Harding 2013). Today we value such images as social history. They offer naturalistic glimpses of the past, often unposed; in On Photography, Susan Sontag notes that, ‘The good manners of a cam- era culture dictate that one is supposed to pretend not to notice when one is being photographed by a stranger in a public place’ (Sontag 1990 [1977], 171). When they Strachan: Tiny Jubilations 3 are discovered in the heavy pages of family albums, as Sontag says, ‘Those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of the dispersed relatives’ (Sontag 1990 [1977], 9). It might not have been at the forefront of the reflex men’s minds when they paced the promenade at Largs, but when we take photographs we ‘par- ticipate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt’; that is why, indeed, ‘All photographs are memento mori’ (Sontag 1990 [1977], 15). Given that photographs necessarily depict the past, we look to them often for evidence, thinking perhaps of the assumed veracity of reportage and scene of crime photographs. Sometimes that evidence is incontrovertible: Betty, the model for my character Rena, did wear a trouser suit, as I’d been told. There it is in black (or navy) and white. But the photograph as hard evidence has long been seen as problematic, even if we do not become entangled in its peculiar phenomenology. Walter Benjamin referred to Brecht’s The Threepenny Trial to describe why: ‘For the situation,’ says Brecht, is ‘made complicated by the fact that less than at any time does a simple “reproduction of reality” express something about reality. A photograph of the Krupps factory or AEG reveals next to nothing Figure 2: How do you like my suit navy 2 piece not bad eh! The last of the double breasted. 4 Strachan: Tiny Jubilations about these institutions. Actual reality has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relations, as in, for example, the factory, no longer makes these explicit. Effectively it is necessary “to build something up”, something “artificial”, “posed”.’ (Benjamin 2015, 91–2) Susan Sontag offers an additional slant: ‘in the situations in which most people use photographs, their value is of the same order of fiction’ (Sontag 1990 [1977], 22), while in his response to On Photography, John Berger tells us that, ‘Photographs in themselves do not narrate’ (Berger 1980, 51).’ I believe that not only do photographs contain narrative, they invite us to invent it: Betty was a fan of Katherine Hepburn, that’s why she wore the suit. The something that it is necessary for us to build up is the fictional endeavour, and although mimesis is part of it, it is not the whole story. With this in mind, we can understand why the examination of family photographs might provide a useful opening strategy for Janice Galloway’s two volumes of memoir, This Is Not About Me (2008) and All Made Up (2011). The titles suggest an ambivalence, to say the least, about the notion that memoir is more ‘truthful’ than fiction, and about the way in which we categorise literary works. In the first volume, the narrator surveys a photograph of herself, her sister and her mother sitting in the living room of their home in Saltcoats: ‘There are three chairs, a wicker rocker with embroidered cushions and a pair of short bare legs poke into the picture from the right, suspended by unknown means. It’s a doll all right, and if it’s a doll, it’s mine. I am implicated in these surroundings by this evidence alone’ (Galloway 2008, 2). The description of the furniture, of the strangely positioned, dismembered doll, as well as the language used (‘implicated’) suggest that Galloway’s investigation is forensic. She is seeking evidence for something, but what? In the second volume, the photograph described at the beginning is of young Janice and her mother standing outside the house, ‘waiting for the shutter release to set us free, our self-conscious- ness rising through the gloss finish paper’ (Galloway 2011, 2). The shadow of the photographer is visible in the photograph: ‘without him, the evidence we were here together on this day would not exist, even if it’s partial’ (Galloway 2011, 4). The repro- duction of reality is in full colour rather than black and white, but any proof it can Strachan: Tiny Jubilations 5 offer is incomplete. Contemporary cognitive theories of memory suggest that while we are likely to be able to come up with a reasonably accurate narrative of our lives, it is not simply a case of whipping out the relevant images from a mental card index. Instead, every instance of remembering is also an instance of retelling.1 Family photographs are more than aides memoire. They do not simply record times gone by, and our responses to them are deeper than nostalgia. Taking photographs, collating them, looking through them, all of these actions can serve to reinforce the idea of the family unit. Marianne Hirsch makes a further argument: the family is in itself traversed and constituted by a series of “familial” looks that place different individuals into familial relation within a field of vision.